Newspapers are considered to be important providers of information, culture and language, and are taxed at a reduced VAT rate in most countries. This paper shows that such a policy may affect newspaper di¤erentiation and lead to greater media bias. We further show that a reduced-rate VAT scheme...

Newspapers have an incentive to moderate their profile in order to gain a larger readership and thus higher advertising revenue. We show that this incentive is weakened both if readers are ad-haters and if they are ad-lovers.

Two-sided platform firms serve distinct customer groups that are connected through interdependent demand, and include major businesses such as the media industry, banking, and the software industry. A well known textbook result in one-sided markets is that a government may increase a...

This paper examines the efficient provision of goods in two-sided markets and characterizes optimal specific and ad-valorem taxes. We show that (i) a monopoly may have too high output compared to the social optimum; (ii) output may be reduced by imposing negative value-added taxes (subsidy) or...

A benchmark result in public economics is that it is possible to increase both tax revenue and welfare by making a monopoly subject to ad valorem taxes rather than unit taxes. We show that such revenue and welfare dominance does not hold in two-sided markets.

Empirical evidence suggests that people dislike ads in TV programs and other media products. In such situations standard economic theory prescribes that the advertising volume can be optimally reduced by levying a tax on ads. However, making use of recent advances in the theory of firm behavior...

Newspapers are two-sided platforms that sell their product both to readers and advertisers. Media firms in general, and newspapers in particular, are considered important providers of information, culture and language in most countries. Newspapers are therefore given preferential tax treatment....